Recombination of Au25+ with free electrons at low energies

The origin of the widely observed enhancement of rates for electron-ion recombination at very low energies is still unknown. We investigated the recombination of Au25+ with free electrons in a merged-beams experiment at the UNILAC accelerator of the GSI in Darmstadt. At E rel= 0 eV we found an enormous enhancement factor of 365 compared to the theory of radiative recombination. An increase of the electron density by a factor of 10 had not much influence on the measured rate coefficient.